Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field

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is a summary of his book POINT BLANK: GUNS AND VIOLENCE IN
AMERICA (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991)".

This book can be ordered directly from Aldine de Gruyter at
200 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne, NY 10532.

Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field

Gary Kleck
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida 32312

Prepared for delivery at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, The Washington Hilton, August 29
through September 1, 1991. Copyright by the American Political
Science Association.

Introduction

This paper of a summary of my book, Point Blank: Guns and
Violence in America, which in turn summarizes the literature on
guns, violence and gun control, as well as reporting new research.
The purpose of the paper is to outline the main findings and
conclusions, without systematically establishing the empirical
basis for each conclusion. These can be found in the book itself.
And since the book has about 570 references, it is not practical to
cite supporting materials for each assertion. Only studies
summarized in the tables are contained in the References. Instead,
I have simply indicated the chapter of the book where interested
readers may find the full set of supporting citations, empirical
evidence, and detailed argumentation.

Why the Issue Matters (Chapter 2)

In 1985, about 31,600 persons were killed with guns, and perhaps
another 130,000 people suffered nonfatal gunshot wounds. The
majority of the deaths, 55%, were suicides, rather than criminal
homicides. Only 37% were homicides, 5% were fatal gun accidents,
and 1.5% each were due to legal intervention (police officers
killing suspects in the line of duty) and to death where it was
undetermined whether injury was intentionally or accidentally
inflicted. Among all deaths due to "external cause," i.e. accident,
suicide or homicide, guns were involved in 22% of them, handguns in
about 13% of them. The majority of all gun deaths involve handguns,
mainly because 79% of the gun homicide deaths involved handguns.
Guns were involved in 1.5% of all deaths, from all causes, in 1985.
They were involved in 59% of suicides, 60% of homicides, and 1.8%
of accidental deaths in 1985.

There were also over 650,000 violent crimes involving guns in
some way in 1985, over 540,000 of them (82%) involving handguns.
Guns were involved in about 12% of all violent crime, and handguns
in about 10%. The majority of the gun crimes were assaults, mostly
threats without any injury or any element of theft or rape.

Gun Ownership (Chapter 2)

The prospects for reducing violence by restricting guns depends
to a great extent on how many guns there are, how people get them,
why they own them, and how strongly they would resist or evade gun
controls in order to hold onto them. Also, one's interpretation of
a positive relationship between violence rates and gun ownership
rates depends on the degree to which one believes that violence can
drive up gun ownership, by motivating people to get guns for
protection, as well as gun ownership increasing violence.

There were probably over 200 million guns in private hands in
the U.S. by 1990, about a third of them handguns. One
straightforward policy implication is that policies which seek to
reduce gun violence by reducing the overall supply of guns, as
distinct from reducing the number possessed just by high-risk
subsets of the population, face an enormous obstacle in this huge
existing stock. Even if further additions to the stock could
somehow be totally and immediately stopped, the size of the stock
and durability of guns imply that, in the absence of mass
confiscations or unlikely voluntary surrenders of guns, it might be
decades before any perceptible impact of a supply-reduction
strategy became apparent.

Gun ownership increased from the 1960's through the 1980's,
especially handgun ownership. Some of the increase was due to the
formation of new households and to growing affluence enabling gun
owners to acquire still more guns; however, a substantial share of
the increase was also a response to rising crime rates among people
who previously did not own guns. Most handguns are owned for
defensive reasons, and many people get guns in response to high or
rising crime rates. Therefore, part of the positive association
sometimes observed between gun ownership levels and crime rates is
due to the effect of the latter on the former, rather than the
reverse. Nevertheless, most guns, especially long guns, are owned
primarily for recreational reasons unconnected with crime.

From the mid-1960's to the mid-1980's, scattered evidence
strongly suggests that, while gun ownership increased in general,
it did so even more among criminals and violence-prone people than
it did among the nonviolent majority of the population. Because
these "high-risk" groups are largely unrepresented in national
surveys, this would partially account for the fact that household
gun prevalence in national surveys remained fairly constant during
this period, despite huge additions to the total stock of privately
owned guns.

Gun owners are not, as a group, psychologically abnormal, nor
are they more racist, sexist, or pro-violent than nonowners. Most
gun ownership is culturally patterned and linked with a rural
hunting subculture. The culture is transmitted across generations,
with recreation-related gun owners being socialized by their
parents into gun ownership and use from childhood. Defensive
handgun owners, on the other hand, are more likely to be discon-
nected from any gun subcultural roots, and their gun ownership is
usually not accompanied by association with other gun owners or by
training in the safe handling of guns. Defensive ownership is more
likely to be an individualistic response to life circumstances
perceived as dangerous. Defensive ownership is also a response to
the perception that the police cannot provide adequate protection.
This response to dangers, however, is not necessarily mediated by
the emotion of fear, but rather may be part of a less emotional
preparation for the possibility of future victimization.

The strongest and most consistent predictors of gun ownership
are hunting, being male, being older, higher income, residence in
rural areas or small towns, having been reared in such small
places, having been reared in the South, and being Protestant. The
social origins of Rs consistently predict having firearms,
supporting the view that early socialization into gun owning
subcultures is important in explaining gun ownership. However,
traits like racial prejudice and punitiveness towards criminals are
not important. Most gun ownership in the general public is related
to outdoor recreation like hunting and its correlates, rather than
crime. On the other hand, ownership of handguns may well be linked
with fear of crime and prior burglary victimization, though find-
ings are necessarily ambiguous due to questions of causal order -
fear could motivate gun acquisition, but having a gun could also
reduce the owner's fear.

The pattern of results as a whole is compatible with the thesis
that gun ownership is a product of socialization into a rural
hunting culture. The findings support a simple explanation of the
high level of gun ownership in the United States, an explanation
which rejects the notion that weak gun laws are somehow
responsible. Unlike European nations with a feudal past, the U.S.
has had both widespread ownership of farmland and millions of acres
of public lands available for hunting. Rather than hunting being
limited to a small land-owning aristocracy, it has been accessible
to the majority of ordinary Americans. Having the income and
leisure to take advantage of these resources, millions of Americans
have hunted for recreation, long after it was no longer essential
to survival for any but an impoverished few. Hunting in turn
encouraged other recreational uses of guns, including target and
other sport shooting, and collecting, of both handgun and long
guns. Rather than high gun ownership being the result of a lack of
strict gun control laws, it is more likely that causation ran in
the other direction, i.e. that high gun ownership discouraged the
enactment of restrictive gun laws, and that the prevalence of guns
was mostly a product of the prevalence of recreational hunting.
Only since the mid-1960s has a large share of gun ownership been
attributable to concerns about crime.

Probably fewer than 2% of handguns and well under 1% of all guns
will ever be involved in a violent crime. Thus, the problem of
criminal gun violence is concentrated within a very small subset of
gun owners, indicating that gun control aimed at the general
population faces a serious needle-in-the-haystack problem.

Criminal gun users most commonly get their guns by buying them
from friends and other nonretail sources, or by theft. Therefore,
gun regulation would be more likely to succeed in controlling gun
violence if it could effectively restrict nondealer acquisitions
and possession of guns by this small high-risk subset of gun
owners.

Focussing on Special Gun Types (Chapter 3)

Since about half of U.S. households have a gun, broadly directed
restrictions on the acquisition, possession, and use of guns
impinge on the lives of millions of Americans, not just a small,
politically powerless subset of them. This is the essential
political obstacle which faces advocates of stricter gun control -
legislators who vote for strong gun laws must face the prospect of
offending large numbers of gun-owning voters. Perhaps in response
to this simple fact, many advocates of more restrictive controls
have directed their focus away from measures which regulate all
types of guns and toward those which regulate special subtypes of
firearms, i.e. types of guns which are owned by smaller numbers of
voters and which are consequently more vulnerable to
regulation.

Pro-control groups have increasingly stressed the need to
control various special weapon categories such as machineguns,
"assault rifles," plastic guns, "Saturday Night Special" handguns,
and "cop-killer" bullets, or sometimes all handguns. For each
weapon or ammunition type, it is argued that the object is espe-
cially dangerous or particularly useful for criminal purposes,
while having little or no counterbalancing utility for lawful
purposes. A common slogan is "This type of gun is good for only one
purpose - killing people."

The specific weapon type so described shifts from one year to
the next, in response to shifts in the political winds rather than
actual criminologically significant shifts in criminal use of guns.
For example, the so-called "cop killer bullets" which were
restricted in 1986, as far as anyone can tell, have never killed a
cop. Likewise, the all-plastic guns which would have been
undetectable by airport security equipment were never actually
manufactured, and thus had never been involved in a single act of
violence.

"Assault rifles" and "assault weapons" became important objects
of gun control efforts in the 1980s. Contrary to widespread claims,
these semi-automatic "military-style" weapons are rarely used by
criminals in general or by drug dealers or juvenile gang members in
particular, are almost never used to kill police officers, are
generally less lethal than ordinary hunting rifles, and are not
easily converted to fully automatic fire. They do offer a rate of
fire somewhat higher than other gun types and can be used with
magazines holding large numbers of cartridges, but there is at
present little reason to believe either attribute is relevant to
the outcome of any significant number of gun crimes. While the
involvement of commonplace semiautomatic pistols has been common in
U.S. violence since the 1920's, probably fewer than 2% of gun
homicides involve the military-style semiautomatic weapons which
are commonly labelled "assault weapons.".

Saturday Night Specials (SNSs) are small, cheap handguns. They
have been the target of special control efforts in the past because
it was claimed that they were the preferred weapon of criminals,
and were especially useful for criminal purposes, based on the twin
notions that they are especially concealable because of their small
size, and that their low price makes them especially affordable for
predominantly low-income criminals. The best available information
indicates the following about SNSs. Only about 10-27% of crime
handguns (in the 1970's) fit the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms (BATF) definition of SNSs (barrel length under three
inches, .32 caliber or less, and price under $50 in mid-1970's
dollars). Thus, most crime handguns were not SNSs, nor did they
claim a share even approaching a majority. Because only about 10%
of violent crimes involve a handgun, SNSs are involved in only
about 2-7% of all violent crimes. Further, the SNS share of crime
guns appears to be no larger than the SNS share of the general
civilian handgun stock - at least 20% of all handguns introduced
into the general civilian stock were SNSs. Thus, there is no strong
reason to believe that criminals are any more likely to use SNSs
than noncriminal members of the general public are. More
specifically, criminals are no more likely to use cheap or small
caliber handguns than noncriminal gun owners. Therefore, there is
no meaningful sense in which criminals can be said to "prefer"
SNSs. On the other hand, there is some mixed sup- port for the idea
that some criminals prefer short-barrelled handguns over
longer-barrelled ones, though the weapons tend to be middle or
large caliber and of good quality. At most, perhaps 7%, and more
realistically 1-2%, of SNSs will ever be involved in even one
violent crime. In sum, most handgun criminals do not use SNSs, and
most SNSs are not owned or used for criminal purposes. In- stead,
most are probably owned by poor people for protection.

One policy implication of the last conclusion is that gun
control efforts directed specifically at SNSs, such as the Ken-
nedy-Rodino bill, would have their greatest impact in reducing the
availability of defensive handguns among low income people. The
identical observation was made by liberal critics about the ban on
importation of SNSs contained in the Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1968.
Effective SNS-specific measures would disproportionately affect the
law-abiding poor, since it is they who are most likely to own SNSs
and obey the laws, and who are least likely to have the money to
buy better quality, and therefore higher-priced, weapons.

Considering the obvious flaws of a policy focussing solely on
SNSs, why would anyone advocate it? One answer is that SNSs may not
be the real target of the policies, but rather that all handguns
are. Given the somewhat obscure and technical definitions that are
actually used in legislation and administrative regulations, it
would be easy to manipulate such a definition in a politically
low-profile way such that most handguns fell within the SNS
category. Another possible motivation is that prohibiting those
types of firearms which poor people can best afford is the next
best thing to an overtly discriminatory policy of banning gun
ownership by poor people, a policy which would be politically, and
perhaps constitutionally, impossible to implement in any but a
covert form.

A SNS-specific control policy could be worse than merely
ineffectual. If it actually did deprive any criminals of SNSs, some
would adapt by substituting larger and/or marginally more expensive
guns, which would imply the substitution of larger cali- ber,
longer barrelled handguns. Wounds inflicted with larger caliber
handguns are more like to result in a death; longer barrelled guns
fire bullets with greater accuracy and a higher muzzle velocity,
thereby increasing their deadliness. Conse- quently, among those
persons who previously would have used SNSs but who, as a result of
the control policy, substituted larger handguns, the attack
fatality rate would almost certainly increase.

Most U.S. gun laws are aimed largely or solely at handguns. This
focus has the same flaw as the focus only on SNSs, but on a larger
scale. While some potentially violent people denied handguns would
do without guns of any kind, others would substitute shotguns and
rifles, which are generally more lethal. Under any but the most
optimistic circumstances, this would result in a net increase in
the number of homicide deaths.

One of the political temptations of handgun-only control is that
it appears to be a satisfactory compromise between doing nothing
about gun violence, which would alienate pro-control vot- ers, and
restricting all gun types, which would alienate many long gun
owners. It is tempting to assume that the results of this apparent
compromise policy would correspondingly lie somewhere between the
results of a policy of doing nothing and the results of one
restricting all guns. This assumption is false - the "middle"
course of restricting only handguns is worse than either of the
other two alternatives.

A clear policy recommendation follows from what should be the
first principle of weapons regulations: Never place restrictions on
a subcategory of weapons without also placing restrictions at least
as stringent on more deadly, easily substituted alternative
weapons.

Focusing on specialized weapon categories will be an unpro-
ductive, but unfortunately increasingly popular gun control stra-
tegy in the foreseeable future. The very features that make the
piecemeal approach ineffective also make it politically attractive.
Thus, policies focusing on machine guns, "assault rifles," plastic
guns, and armor-piercing bullets are inoffensive to most voters and
have little cost, but they also address weapons that are only very
rarely used by criminals.

So far, this is merely a special case of a political universal
applying to any policy area - weak approaches carry less risk to
policymakers, while also having less impact on the target problem.
However, many special-weapon gun control measures are worse than
this, since they have serious potential for making the violence
problem worse. Policies targeting only less lethal weaponry, such
as handguns generally or "Saturday Night Specials" specifically,
can increase the gun death total by inadvertently encouraging the
substitution of more lethal types of guns.

Defensive Use of Guns by Crime Victims (Chapter 4)

Policy analysts seeking to assess the relative costs and
benefits of gun control sometimes simplify their task by assuming
that gun ownership has no significant benefits, beyond the
relatively minor ones of recreational enjoyment of shooting sports
like hunting. Under this assumption, it is unnecessary to show that
a given law produces a large reduction in violence, since even one
life saved would surely outweigh the supposedly negligible benefits
of gun ownership. This simplification, however, is unrealistic,
because it erroneously assumes that gun ownership and use has no
defensive or deterrent value, and thus no potential for preventing
deaths or injuries.

Each year about 1500-2800 criminals are lawfully killed by
gun-wielding American civilians in justifiable or excusable
homicides, far more than are killed by police officers. There are
perhaps 600,000-1 million defensive uses of guns each year, about
the same as the number of crimes committed with guns. These
astounding totals may be less surprising in light of the following
facts. About a third of U.S. households keep a gun at least
partially for defensive reasons; at any one time nearly a third of
gun owners have a firearm in their home (usually a handgun) which
is loaded; about a quarter of retail businesses have a gun on the
premises; and perhaps 5% of U.S. adults regularly carry a gun for
self-defense.

Keeping a gun for home defense makes most defensive gun owners
feel safer, and most also believe they are safer because they have
a gun. The belief is not necessarily a delusion. People who use
guns for self-protection in robberies and assaults are less likely
to have the crime completed against them (in a robbery, this means
losing their property), and, contrary to widespread belief, are
less likely to be injured, compared to either victims who use other
forms of resistance or to victims who do nothing to resist.
(Criminals take the gun away from the victim in less than 1% of
these incidents.) The evidence does not support the idea that
nonresistance is safer than resisting with a gun.

Defensive uses of guns most often occur in circumstances where
the victims are likely to have access to their guns, mostly in
their homes or places of business. Thus, defensive gun uses are
most commonly linked with assaults in the home (presumably mostly
domestic violence), commercial robberies, and residential
burglaries.

The fact that armed victims can effectively disrupt crimes
suggests that widespread civilian gun ownership might also deter
some criminals from attempting crimes in the first place. There
probably will never be definitive evidence on this deterrence
question, since it revolves around the issue of how many crimes do
not occur because of victim gun ownership. However, scattered
evidence is consistent with a deterrence hypothesis. In prison
surveys criminals report that they have refrained from committing
crimes because they thought a victim might have a gun. "Natural
experiments" indicate that rates of "gun deterrable" crimes have
declined after various highly publicized incidents related to
victim gun use, including gun training programs, incidents of
defensive gun use, and passage of a law which required household
gun ownership. Widespread gun ownership may also deter burglars
from entering occupied homes, reducing confrontations with
residents, and thereby reducing deaths and injuries. U.S. burglars
are far less likely to enter occupied premises than burglars in
nations with lower gun ownership.

Gun use by private citizens against violent criminals and
burglars is common and about as frequent as legal actions like
arrests, is a more prompt negative consequence of crime than legal
punishment, and is more severe, at its most serious, than legal
system punishments. On the other hand, only a small percentage of
criminal victimizations transpire in a way that results in
defensive gun use; guns certainly are not usable in all crime
situations. Victim gun use is associated with lower rates of
assault or robbery victim injury and lower rates of robbery
completion than any other defensive action or doing nothing to
resist. Serious predatory criminals perceive a risk from victim gun
use which is roughly comparable to that of criminal justice system
actions, and this perception may influence their criminal behavior
in socially desirable ways.

The most parsimonious way of linking these previously uncon-
nected and unknown or obscure facts is to tentatively conclude that
civilian ownership and defensive use of guns deters violent crime
and reduces burglar-linked injuries.

Rates of commercial robbery, residential burglary injury, and
rape might be still higher than their already high levels were it
not for the dangerousness of the prospective victim population. Gun
ownership among prospective victims may well have as large a
crime-inhibiting effect as any crime-generating effects of gun
possession among prospective criminals. This could account for the
failure of researchers to find a significant net relationship
between rates of crime like homicide and robbery, and measures of
general gun ownership - the two effects may roughly cancel each
other out. Guns are potentially lethal weapons whether wielded by
criminals or victims. They are frightening and intimidating to
those they are pointed at, whether these be predators or the preyed
upon. Guns thereby empower both those who would use them to
victimize and those who would use them to prevent their victimi-
zation. Consequently, they are a source of both social order and
disorder, depending on who uses them, just as is true of the use of
force in general.

The failure to fully acknowledge this reality can lead to grave
errors in devising public policy to minimize violence through gun
control. While some gun laws are intended to reduce gun possession
only among relatively limited "high-risk" groups such as convicted
felons, through such measures as laws licensing gun owners or
requiring permits to purchase guns, other laws are aimed at
reducing gun possession in all segments of the civilian population,
both criminal and noncriminal. Examples would be the Morton Grove,
Illinois handgun possession ban, near approximations of such bans
(as in New York City and Washington, D.C.), prohibitions of handgun
sales (such as those in Chicago), and restrictive variants of laws
regulating the carrying of concealed weapons. By definition, laws
are most likely to be obeyed by the law-abiding, and gun laws are
no different. Therefore, measures applying equally to criminals and
noncriminals are almost certain to reduce gun possession more among
the latter than the former. Because very little serious violent
crime is committed by persons without previous records of serious
violence (Chapter 5), there are at best only modest direct crime
control benefits to be gained by reductions in gun possession among
noncriminals, although even marginal reductions in gun possession
among criminals might have crime-inhibiting effects. Consequently,
one has to take seriously the possibility that "across-the-board"
gun control measures could decrease the crime-control effects of
noncriminal gun ownership more than they would decrease the
crime-causing effects of criminal gun ownership. For this reason,
more narrowly targeted gun control measures like gun owner
licensing and permit-topurchase systems seem preferable.

People skeptical about the value of gun control sometimes argue
that while a world in which there were no guns would be desirable,
it is also unachievable. The evidence summarized here raises a more
radical possibility - that a world in which no one had guns might
actually be less safe than one in which nonaggressors had guns and
aggressors somehow did not. As a practical matter, the latter world
is no more achievable than the former, but the point is worth
raising as a way of clarifying what the goals of rational gun
control policy should be. If gun possession among prospective
victims tends to reduce violence, then reducing such gun possession
is not, in and of itself, a social good. Instead, the best policy
goal to pursue may be to shift the distribution of gun possession
as far as practical in the direction of likely aggressors being
disarmed and likely nonaggressors being armed. To disarm
noncriminals in the hope this might indirectly help reduce access
to guns among criminals is not a cost-free policy.

Effects of Guns on Assaultive Violence (Chapter 5)

Guns in the hands of prospective victims of violence can deter
criminal attempts or disrupt crimes once they are attempted,
thereby exerting a violence-reducing effect. Oddly enough, guns in
the hands of aggressors also have certain violence-reducing
effects, along with the more obvious violence-increasing effects.
The power which weaponry confers has conventionally been treated as
exclusively violence-enhancing - it has commonly been assumed that
weapon possession and use serves only to increase the likelihood of
the victim's injury and death (e.g. Newton and Zimring 1969). This
is an unduly restrictive conceptualization of the significance of
weaponry. A broader perspective starts with a recognition of
weaponry as a source of power, frequently used instrumentally to
achieve goals by inducing compliance with the user's demands. The
ultimate goal behind an act of violence is not necessarily the
victim's death or injury, but rather may be money, sexual
gratification, respect, attention, or the terrorizing, humiliation,
or domination of the victim. Power can be, and usually is, wielded
so as to obtain these things without inflicting physical injury.
Threats, implied or overt, usually suffice and are often preferred
to physical attack.

The effects of guns in the hands of aggressors can be better
understood if we view violent events as being composed of an
ordered series of stages, with the occurrence and outcome of each
stage being contingent on previous stages. Figure 1 lists the
stages, along with the likely effects which gun possession by
aggressor or victim is likely to have on the outcome.

Figure 1. Effects of Possession and Use of Guns
on Assaultive Violence
Stage in Guns in the Hands of the:
Hostile Encounters Aggressor Victim
Confrontation (+) (+/-)
Threat, given confrontation (+) (-)
Attack, given threat - -
Injury, given attack - 0
Death, given injury + 0
Notes:
+ means gun possession of use increases the probability that the
encounter will proceed from the previous stage to the current one,
- means a gun decreases this probability, and 0 means no effect.
Parentheses around symbols indicates there is insufficient
information to do more than state a hypothesized direction of
effect.

(1) Confrontation. First, the prospective aggressor and victim
coincide in time and space, entering into a potentially conflictual
encounter with each other. Possession of a gun can embolden both
victims and aggressors to go where they like, including dangerous
places where they might adventitiously encounter a stranger who, in
the course of the interaction, becomes an adversary, or it may even
encourage them to stop avoiding, or even deliberately seek out,
contact with persons with whom they already had a hostile
relationship. Thus, gun ownership could increase the rate of
assaultive violence by giving people freedom of movement without
regard to the risks of entering into dangerous circumstances,
thereby increasing the rate of hostile encounters. There is,
however, no systematic evidence on these possible effects.

(2) Threat. Once aggressor and victim find themselves
confronting one another in a hostile encounter, a gun in the
possession of the aggressor could encourage him to threaten the
victim, with words or a gesture, possibly alluding to the gun. On
the other hand, the prospective victim's possession of a gun could,
if it was known to the would-be aggressor, discourage the aggressor
from expressing a threat. Again, there is no systematic evidence
bearing directly on this effect.

(3) Attack. Some hostile encounters go beyond verbal or gestural
threats, escalating to an attempt to physically injure the victim,
i.e. proceeding to an attack. An aggressor's possession of a gun
can either increase or decrease the probability that he will attack
his victim. At least four categories of effects on attack can be
conceptualized, and they can be labelled facilitation, triggering,
inhibition and redundancy.

Facilitation. A gun could make possible or easier an attack
which would otherwise be physically or emotionally impossible,
dangerous, or difficult to carry out. It has often been remarked
that a gun serves as an "equalizer," that it is a way of making
power relations more equal than they otherwise would be. Just as a
prospective victim's possession of a gun can give him power greater
than or equal to his adversary and discourage an attack, the
aggressor's possession of a gun could encourage it. The gun might
assure the aggressor that his attack will so effectively hurt his
victim that counterattack will be impossible, or at least that his
victim will be afraid to strike back, even if physically capable of
doing so. Guns can thereby encourage weaker adversaries to attack
stronger ones. Thus guns are more commonly used when women attack
men than when women attack other women, are more common when an
individual attacks a group than when the situation is reversed, and
so forth. Guns also facilitate attack from a distance. As someone
once observed noted, "a gun may not be absolutely necessary to
kill, but at fifty yards it's certainly a help." Further, a gun may
facilitate an attack by a person who is unwilling to attack in a
way which involves physical contact with his victim, or by a person
too squeamish to use a messier weapon like a knife or club.

Triggering. This is the effect which experimental psychologists
label the "weapons effect." Since it is but one of many effects of
weaponry, this term is unsuitable, so I have relabelled it the
triggering effect. Psychologists have argued that a person who is
already angered may attack when they see a weapon, due to the
learned association between weapons and aggressive behavior. The
experimental research literature on this hypothesis is almost
exactly divided between studies supporting it and studies failing
to support it. Generally, the more realistic the study's conditions
and the more relevant to real-world aggression, the less supportive
the results were. There may be triggering effects, but they appear
to be very contingent effects, which depend on settings and
conditions not yet very well- specified.

Inhibition. Some of the "weapons effect" studies found evidence
that weapons could inhibit aggression as well as trigger it. While
the reasons for these experimental findings are not clear, in real
world violence, one reason for such an effect might be that a gun
provides an aggressor with a more lethal weapon than he wants. Most
aggressors do not want to kill, but this could easily happen if
they attacked with a gun. Therefore, an aggressor may refrain from
attacking altogether, for fear that he might do end up inflicting
more harm than he wanted to.

Redundancy. This inelegant term alludes to the possibility that
possession of a gun could make a physical attack unnecessary, by
making it possible for an aggressor to get what he wants without
attacking.

Weapons are an important source of power frequently wielded to
achieve some emotional or material goal - to obtain sexual
gratification in a rape or money in a robbery, or, more frequently,
to frighten and dominate victims in some other assault. All of
these things can be gained without an attack, and indeed the
possession of a gun can serve as a substitute for attack, rather
than its vehicle. In robberies, offenders without guns often feel
they must attack their victim in order to insure that the victim
will not resist, while robbers with guns are confident they can
gain the victim's compliance merely by pointing their gun at them.
In assaults, a gun can enable an aggressor to terrify his victim or
emotionally hurt him, making a physical attack unnecessary.

It is not yet possible to separately assess the relative
importance of each of these possible causal effects. However, the
total effect of all them considered together is fairly clear. The
net effect of aggressor gun possession on whether the aggressor
attacks is negative. In at least 17 prior studies, mostly of
robbery, but also of assault, aggressors with guns were less likely
to attack and/or injure their victim.

(4) Injury. Once an aggressor makes an attack, it may or may not
result in injury. That is, only some attempts to injure are
successful. The rate at which attacks result in physical injury to
the victim is lower when the attacker fires a gun than when he
throws a punch, attempts to cut or stab his victim, or tries to
strike the victim with a blunt instrument of some kind. This
presumably is because it is difficult to shoot a gun (usually a
handgun) accurately, especially under the emotionally stressful
conditions which prevail in most violent encounters. Only about 19%
of incidents where an aggressor shot at a victim result in the
victim suffering a gunshot wound, while the comparable attack
completion rate is about 55% for knife attacks. Since guns
facilitate attacks at a distance and attacks against more difficult
targets, they may thereby also reduce the attack completion rate.
(5) Death. Finally, if the aggressor does inflict a physical injury
on the victim, it may or may not result in death. Less than 1% of
all criminal assaults result in death, and the measured fatality
rate is under 15% even if we limit attention just to gunshot
woundings. Further, because nonfatal attacks are substantially
undercounted, while fatal attacks are fairly completely counted,
the true fatality rate in gunshot woundings is actually still
lower, probably under 10%.

Nevertheless, the measured wounding fatality rate for guns is
about four times higher than that of woundings with knives, the
next most lethal weapon, among those which could be used in the
same circumstances as guns. This might seem to indicate that if
guns became scarce and attackers used guns rather than knives, only
one fourth as many victims would die. This reasoning, however, is
invalid because it implicitly attributes all of the difference in
fatality rates to the weapon itself, and assumes that all else,
including the intentions and motives of the aggressors, is equal in
gun and knife attacks. This assumption is unrealistic. Evidence
indicates that aggressors who use guns choose them over other
available weapons - a gun is not used just because "it was there;"
weapon choice is not random. Rather, more serious aggressors use
more serious weaponry. For example, aggressors with longer records
of violence in their past are more likely to use guns. Thus, some
of the 4-to-1 difference in fatality rates between guns and knives
is due to differences in the people who used the weapons, rather
than just the technical differences between the weapons themselves.
Since weapon scarcity would presumably not alter the intentions and
aggressive drive of aggressors, this implies that the fatality rate
would drop by a factor of less than four if knives were substituted
for guns. It is impossible to say how much less, since it is
impossible to measure and control for the intentions and intensity
of an aggressor's anger and willingness to hurt his victim at the
moment of the attack. Nevertheless, studies that have imperfectly
controlled for aggressor traits thought to be correlated with these
factors indicate that guns still appear to be more lethal than
knives.

To summarize, an aggressor's possession and use of a gun
apparently reduces the probability that he will attack, reduces the
probability that the attack will result in an injury, and increases
the probability that the injury will be fatal. Therefore, it is not
at all obvious that threatening situations with a gun-armed
aggressor are more likely to result in the victim's death, since it
is not obvious what the relative balance of these three
countervailing effects is. The best empirical evidence on real-
life violent incidents indicates that the net effect is essentially
zero. That is, the overall probability of a threatening situation
ending in the victim's death is about the same when the aggressor
is armed with a gun as it is when the aggressor is unarmed. In
short, guns have many strong effects on violent encounters, but
they work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing
directions, and these effects apparently more or less cancel each
other out.

Note that this conclusion takes no account of gun effects on
confrontations and threats. It is still possible that gun
availability in a population could affect the rates of assault and
murder, despite the foregoing conclusions, if it significantly
encouraged people to more frequently enter into dangerous
confrontations and to issue threats or otherwise initiate hostile
interactions. Also, an analysis focussing solely on individual
violent incidents cannot take account of possible deterrent effects
of victims having guns, which would tend to discourage aggressors
from seeking contact with victims or threatening them.
Consequently, the net impact of widespread gun ownership must be
assessed using data on aggregates like cities or states, where the
combined impact of all of these separate effects can be estimated.
These kinds of studies will be summarized later.

Effects of Guns on Robbery (Chapter 5)

A robber's goal is to get his victim's property. Injury to the
victim appears to be more of unintended by-product of the crime
than an important goal, in contrast to homicides and assaults.
Consequently, guns have some additional effects peculiar to
robberies, as well the effects observable in assaultive crimes.
They may have a facilitative effect similar to that connected with
assaultive crimes, since they may encourage some people to rob who
would not be willing to do so without a gun. They also appear to
encourage robbers to tackle more difficult, better guarded (and
more lucrative) targets, such as stores or groups of people on the
street, rather than lone individuals. While this might seem to
imply that gun availability should increase the robbery rate, the
best available evidence indicates that the former has no apparent
net effect on the latter. This may be due partly to deterrent
effects of victim gun ownership, especially the impact of defensive
gun ownership and use by store owners on commercial robberies.
However, gun possession by robbers also may have its own negative
effect. Because the average "take" in gun robberies is higher than
in nongun robberies, a robber can acquire a given amount of money
(e.g. that needed to support a drug habit) with fewer
robberies.

Concerning the attacks, injuries, and deaths linked with
robberies, the effects of robber gun use parallel those observed in
assaults, with some additional elements also apparent. Robber gun
use appears to inhibit victim resistance, thereby reducing the
robber's need to attack and injure the victim. And indeed, studies
have invariably indicated that gun robbers are less like to attack
or injure their victims than are unarmed robbers. On the other
hand, if the victim is injured, he is more likely to die if shot
with a gun than if injured in some other way. As with assaultive
crimes, it is unclear how much of this greater fatality rate is
attributable to the weapons and how much to robber differences.

Impact of Gun Ownership Levels on Violent Crime Rates (Ch.
5)

The findings of aggregate studies are summarized in Table 1.
Their findings are almost exactly evenly split between 12 findings
that support the idea that higher gun levels increase crime rates
and 11 findings that do not. All but a handful of the studies are
technically very weak. They rely on small samples, sometimes
including as few as nine, or even four cases; only Bordua (1986)
had more than 50 cases. In combination with the multicollinearity
that typically characterizes aggregate data, this implies very
unstable results. Most use measures of gun ownership which are
either known to be invalid or whose validity is unknown. Eight of
the studies did not control for any other factors that might be as-
sociated with gun ownership and could affect crime rates, making it
impossible to check whether any observed association between gun
and violence levels were spurious; 11 studies controlled for no
more than two other variables.

The most critical flaw in the aggregate-level studies is the
failure to model the two-way relationship between crime rates and
gun levels. Higher crime rates can cause more people to acquire
guns for self-defense. Consequently, any significant positive
associations generated in studies failing to model the possible
two-way relationship will at least partially reflect the effect of
crime rates on gun rates, rather than the reverse. Whether there is
also any effect of guns on violence is impossible to detect from
these findings. Of eighteen studies, the problem was statistically
addressed in only four of them. These studies generally found no
impact of gun ownership levels on violent crime rates.

Effects of Guns on Suicide (Chapter 6)

In a suicide, victim and offender are the same person, so there
is no victim resistance to overcome. This radically changes the
nature of the technology needed to carry the act out. The gun's
capacity to facilitate attacks against strong victims or attacks at
a distance is irrelevant. On the other hand, its lethality, and the
quickness with which it can be used, may be significant for
suicides.

Gun availability might increase suicide rates by giving suicide
attempters a more lethal method. It could be argued that, in the
absence of a gun, while some attempters would still persist after a
nonfatal suicide attempt, others would not and lives would
therefore be saved. This argument differs, however, from, the
parallel argument made for gun effects in assaultive crimes. Unlike
in the latter case, there are many common methods of committing
suicide which are nearly as lethal, and in other ways even more
satisfactory, than guns. The fatality rate in gun suicide attempts
is about 85%, but it is about 80% in hanging attempts, 77% with
carbon monoxide, and 75% with drowning. These are only slight
differences, and some or all of them could be due to greater
seriousness of intent among gun users. There is evidence that
suicide attempters who use more lethal methods are more intent on
killing themselves, rather than merely making an attempt as a "cry
for help" to those around them.

Other ways of committing suicide are in many ways as
satisfactory or even superior to using a gun. For example, using
carbon monoxide in the form of exhaust fumes does not disfigure the
victim as much as shooting, is not as messy, is less painful, is
nearly as lethal, and is quieter and therefore less likely to
summon people who might intervene to save the attempter's life.
Consequently, there is more reason with suicide than with homicide
to expect that nongun methods could be substituted for guns with
equally frequent fatal results.

Consistent with this assessment, previous research has indicated
that while gun ownership levels are consistently related to the
rate of gun suicides, they are unrelated to total suicide rate (see
Table 2). That is, where guns are common, people will more
frequently use them to kill themselves, but this does not affect
the total number of people who die. Apparently, gun availability
affects only method choice, not the frequency of fatal
outcomes.

Gun Accidents (Chapter 7)

While gun accidents contribute only about 5% of the deaths
linked with guns, they play an important rhetorical role in the gun
control debate. They are used in attempts to persuade people that
keeping guns in their homes for protection is foolish because the
risks of a gun accident exceed any defensive benefits. Gun
accidents play a different rhetorical role in the debate from
homicides or suicides because most people can accurately tell
themselves that there is no one is their household like to assault
another person or attempt suicide, but it is harder to confidently
state that no one will be involved in an accident. Since anybody
can have an accident, every household with a gun is at risk of
suffering a gun accident.

There are several problems with this argument. First, gun
accidents are quite rare relative to the numbers of people exposed
to them. The rate of accidental death per 100,000 guns or per
100,000 gun-owning households is less than 4-6% of the
corresponding rates for automobiles, and has also been sharply
declining for over 20 years, despite rapid increases in the size of
the gun stock. Second, the risk of a gun accident is not randomly
distributed across the gun-owning population and is not a
significant risk for more than a small fraction of owners. Gun
accidents are apparently largely confined to an unusually reckless
subset of the population, with gun accidents disproportionately
occurring to people with long records of motor vehicle accidents,
traffic tickets, drunk driving arrests, and arrests for violent
offenses. Accidents are most common among alcoholics and people
with personality traits related to recklessness, impulsiveness,
impatience, and emotional immaturity. The circumstances of gun
accidents commonly involve acts of unusual recklessness, such as
"playing" with loaded guns, pulling the trigger to see if a gun is
loaded, and playing Russian roulette with a revolver. Gun accidents
are largely confined to defensive gun owners - less than one sixth
of accidental deaths are connected with hunting. Consequently, gun
accidents are quite rare for ordinary gun owners, especially when
compared with the frequency of defensive uses.

Contrary to impressions left by the news media, gun accidents
rarely involve small children. There are probably fewer than 100
fatal handgun accidents involving preadolescent children in the
entire nation each year. Instead, gun accidents are largely
concentrated in the same age groups where assaultive violence is
concentrated, among adolescent and young adult males.

Most gun safety training is aimed at hunters, rather than the
defensive gun owners who make up the bulk of people involved in gun
accidents. Because of this narrow focus, and because the training
does not treat alcoholism or modify the shooter's personality, it
probably has little impact outside of the hunting community. On the
other hand, it might be possible to reduce gun accidents through
gun laws (mainly aimed at reducing crime) which prohibit gun
acquisition or possession by high-risk groups like felons or
alcoholics.

Types of Gun Controls (Chapter 8)

"Gun control" encompasses many different forms of laws intended
to regulate human behavior in some way related to firearms. Some
controls regulate gun acquisition, restricting the purchasing,
trading, or receiving of guns. Gun owner license laws require that
people have a license in order to lawfully possess a gun, even in
the home, and in order to acquire the gun in the first place. This
license is not issued until the applicant has passed through a
check of official records to see if the person has a prior criminal
conviction, and possibly to see if they have some other
disqualifying traits, such as alcoholism or mental illness.
Purchase permit laws require a person to get a permit before buying
a gun, and applicants must first pass through a records check.
"Application-to-purchase" systems are similar to purchase permit
systems, except that the records check is typically optional, and
the system usually requires a minimum waiting period between
initial purchase attempt and final delivery of the gun.
Registration systems merely record the acquisition or possession of
a gun, linking each gun with a particular owner. They do not screen
for unqualified gun buyers.

Other laws regulate gun transactions from the other end,
licensing and regulating the selling of guns, or regulating their
manufacture or importation. Still others regulate various kinds of
gun use. Some laws forbid the carrying of guns in public places,
while others require licenses to do so. Restrictions are generally
stronger regarding concealed carrying than open carrying, and
stronger with respect to carrying on the person than carrying in a
motor vehicle. Some attach mandatory penalties to unlawful
carrying. Other laws attempt to discourage gun use in crimes by
attaching additional penalties (some discretionary, others
mandatory) if various dangerous felonies are committed with a
gun.

Almost all states prohibit possession of guns by high-risk
subgroups of the population, most commonly convicted criminals,
mentally ill people, drug addicts, alcoholics, and minors. These
laws do not directly restrict the original acquisition of guns, but
instead make it somewhat more legally risky to be in possession of
guns at any one time.

The strongest gun laws of all impose bans on the possession,
sale, and/or manufacture of various categories of guns. While no
U.S. jurisdiction forbids gun ownership altogether, New York City
and Washington, D.C. have de facto bans on the private possession
of handguns, and some small towns have formal handgun bans. Some
cities, such as Chicago, forbid the sale of handguns within city
limits, without banning their possession. Finally, a number of
states have banned the sale and manufacture of "Saturday Night
Specials," usually defined in practice as guns made of cheap metal
with a low melting point.

Public Opinion and Support for Gun Laws (Chapter 9)

Levels of support for gun control have shown no clear long- term
trends in the past decades. There is short-term volatility in
reported levels of support for some measures, consistent with
evidence that opinion is easily changed and that gun control is not
a salient issue for many Americans, despite the emotional intensity
of debates among activist minorities. The intensity of support for
gun control appears to be weaker than opposition, in the sense that
opponents report that they are much more likely to actually do
something based on their beliefs, such as contributing money to an
organization connected the issue or writing a letter to a public
official. Much of the support for gun control is not utilitarian or
instrumentalist in character: that is, many people support gun
control even though they do not believe it is an effective tool for
reducing violence. Instead, positions on gun control seem
symptomatic of culture conflict, with gun law used as a way of
declaring gun ownership and gun owners to be morally inferior,
parallel to the way alcohol prohibition was used as a way for older
Anglo-Saxon Protestants to condemn the culture of supposedly free-
drinking Catholics from Irish or Southern and Eastern European
backgrounds.

Table 3 shows the level of public support for many different
specific gun control proposals. There are a large number of weak or
moderate controls which a majority of Americans will endorse if
asked, though few will volunteer "gun control" as an answer if
asked an open-ended question soliciting their opinion about how
crime might be reduced. Bans on gun possession do not have majority
support, but many moderate regulatory measures do. Controls on
handguns enjoy more support than controls on the more widely owned
rifles and shotguns. There is more support for "getting tough on
criminals" than for controls likely to restrict or impose costs on
ordinary gun owners. In short, Americans support controls unlikely
to have any direct impact on themselves, while opposing those which
might impose some costs on them or interfere with their own gun
ownership.

Table 4 summarizes prior research on the impact of gun laws on
violent crime rates, while Table 5 summarizes research on their
impact on suicide rates. Given the previously noted lack of support
for the notion that guns have a net violence-increasing impact on
either violence rates or the outcomes of individual violent
incidents, it is not surprising that research has failed to
indicate consistent support for the view that gun laws reduce
violence. Most studies do not support this idea, and the few that
do are extremely weak methodologically. The more common technical
weaknesses are listed in Table 4.

Kleck and Patterson (1991) sought to avoid all of these
technical problems. Their analysis covered all forms of violence
which involves guns, encompassed every large (over 100,000
population) city in the nation, and assessed all major forms of
existing gun control in the U.S. Their findings are summarized in
Table 6. They indicate that gun ownership levels have no net
positive effect on the total rate of any major form of violence,
and that, with few exceptions, existing gun control laws have no
net negative effect on violence rates.

Table 6. The Effect of Gun Control Laws and Gun Ownership Levels
on Violence Rates
Model
Fatal Gun
Murder Aslt Robbery Rape Suicide Accidents
Significant
positive effect
of gun ownership
on violence? NO NO NO NO NO NO
Significant
negative effect
of gun laws on
violence?
License to possess gun in home NO NO NO NO NO YES
Permit to purchase MAYBEa NO NO NO NO NO
Application to purchase NO NO NO NO NO NO
Waiting period to receive gun NO NO NO NO NO NO
Ban on possession by criminals NO MAYBEaMAYBEa NO NO NO
Ban on possession by mentally ill MAYBEa NO NO NO MAYBEa NO
Ban on possession by addicts NO NO NO NO NO NO
Ban on possession by alcoholics NO NO NO NO NO NO
Ban on purchase by minors NO NO NO NO NO NO
Registration of guns NO NO NO NO NO NO
State or local dealer license NO YESa NO NO MAYBEa NO
Concealed handgun carrying NO NO NO NO
forbidden or permit hard to get
Open handgun carrying forbidden NO NO NO NO
or permit hard to get
Mandatory penalty, unlawful carry MAYBEa NO YESa NO
Discretionary add-on penalty for NO NO YESa NO
crimes committed with a gun
Mandatory add-on penalty for NO NO NO NO
crimes committed with a gun
State Constitutional guarantee of NO NO NO NO
individual right to bear arms
De facto ban on handgun possession NO NO NO NO NO NO
Ban on sale of Sat. Night Specials NO NO NO NO NO NO
Summary: 4 YES, 7 MAYBE, 91 NO
Notes:
a. Gun law appeared to reduce gun use in this category of violence.
Source: Kleck and Patterson (1991)

The only clear exceptions were owner licensing, which seems to
reduce fatal gun accidents, add-on penalties for committing crimes
with a gun, which appear to reduce robbery, mandatory penalties for
unlawful gun carrying, which also seem to reduce robbery, and state
or local licensing of gun dealers, which (surprisingly) appears to
reduce suicides and assaults.

Policy Conclusions (Chapter 11)

Despite substantial variation in gun control severity and gun
ownership levels across U.S. cities, there is no evidence that
these have any measurable impact on violence levels, although they
do affect the frequency with which guns are used in some kinds of
violence. On the other hand, the frequency with which guns are
carried may have an impact on robbery which gun ownership levels do
not, and gun ownership within special high-risk subsets of the
population may have an impact on violence rates which general gun
ownership levels do not.

Therefore, the significance of the few gun control measures
found to be effective should not be overlooked. There is empirical
support for some moderate gun controls. I favor a national "instant
records check," which would screen for high-risk gun buyers similar
to owner license and purchase permit systems, but without the
delays and arbitrary administration which sometimes characterizes
those controls. The system should cover nondealer transactions as
well as dealer sales, and apply to rifles and shotguns, as well as
handguns. Also, tighter licensing of gun dealers and increased
enforcement of carry laws may be useful.

Gun control is a very minor, though not entirely irrelevant,
part of the solution to the violence problem, just as guns are of
only very minor significance as a cause of the problem. The U.S.
has more violence than other nations for reasons unrelated to its
extraordinarily high gun ownership. Fixating on guns seems to be,
for many people, a fetish which allows them to ignore the more
intransigent causes of American violence, including its dying
cities, inequality, deteriorating family structure, and the all-
pervasive economic and social consequences of a history of slavery
and racism. And just as gun control serves this purpose for
liberals, equally useless "get tough" proposals, like longer prison
terms, mandatory sentencing, and more use of the death penalty
serve the purpose for conservatives. All parties to the crime
debate would do well to give more concentrated attention to more
difficult, but far more relevant, issues like how to generate more
good-paying jobs for the underclass which is at the heart of the
violence problem.

REFERENCES

Beha, James. 1977. "And Nobody Can Get You Out." Boston
University Law Review 57:96-146, 289-333.

Bordua, David J. 1986. "Firearms Ownership and Violent Crime: A
Comparison of Illinois Counties." Pp. 156-88 in The Social Ecology
of Crime, edited by James M. Byrne and Robert J. Sampson. N.Y.:
Springer-Verlag.

Brearley, H.C. 1932. Homicide in the United States. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

____ 1984a. "The Relationship Between Gun Ownership Levels and
Rates of Violence in the United States." Pp. 99-135 in Firearms and
Violence: Issues of Public Policy, edited by Don B. Kates, Jr.
Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger.

Newton, George D., and Franklin Zimring. 1969. Firearms and
Violence in American Life. A Staff Report to the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Nicholson, Robert, and Anne Garner. 1980. The Analysis of the
Firearms Control Act of 1975. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Conference of
Mayors.